Exmilitary

With drumming by Zach Hill (Hella, Marnie Stern), the Sacramento punk-rap outfit offers a bludgeoning slab of hostility on its free mixtape.

Energy without insight is monotonous. Insight without humor is preachy. Humor without frustration is toothless. Frustration without humanity is destructive. And humanity without energy is defeatist. If an album operates with the purpose of being a big noisy fuck-shit-up machine, missing just one of those elements can leave you with an overbearing mess, where every speaker-rattling burst of noise or cathartically screamed hook turns you back instead of getting you all riled up. Sacramento punk-rap outfit Death Grips are known for starting frothing mosh pits with a style that seems in keeping with the hardcore-meets-hip-hop confluence that first ran through skate culture a few decades back. Exmilitary, their free mixtape, is a bludgeoning slab of hostility that plays like both sides of a circa-1987 Cro-Mags b/w Just-Ice home tape bleeding through each other.

Exmilitary avoids any of the flaws outlined above, but it's still a potentially alienating album: unnerving when you're not on its aggro wavelength, inviting when you are, and transfixing either way, thanks to the aggregate work of Death Grips' core. The raspy, deliberate MC Ride doesn't so much flow as bellow. Producer/videographer Flatlander and co-producer Info Warrior hit both sides of the audio-visual equation with overloaded noise (check the "Guillotine" video for starters). Additional vocalist Mexican Girl skulks in the background and spits venom for occasional effective emphasis. And Zach Hill, the Hella drummer-- recently heard on Marnie Stern's self-titled album-- provides some of the live percussion elements. But isolating each member's specific contributions seems like a good way to make an overwhelming sound seem flimsier than it really is.

That said, MC Ride might be the most upfront element. His tendency to go hard in the rawest way possible with doomsayer verses has slotted him in a strange no-man's land between Southern and avant-rap. His tangled, diabolical lyrics are wrapped up in lust, drug panic, metaphysical power-tripping, and political agitation, and he delivers them as if every syllable were an exclamation point. And while there's not a ton of nuance, there's a surprising versatility, as Ride's rhymes range from malevolent to anxious to smart-assed. Monolithic and harsh, his voice sounds powerful doubling up the beats to the point where it doesn't even seem like a problem when it's halfway buried in the mix.

The production does its damnedest to capture punk aggression for a hip-hop context without pushing things too far in either direction. Fuck-the-cops anthem "Klink" invokes Black Flag's "Rise Above", the opening scream from Bad Brains' "Supertouch/Shitfit" punctuates "Takyon (Death Yon)", and the beat to "Spread Eagle Cross the Block" is built sturdily around Link Wray's "Rumble". On sex-maniac anthem "I Want It I Need It (Death Heated)", a devastating hijack of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" perfectly conjures up this music's intersection of choppy, riff-heavy beat assault and psychedelic sprawl. Juke-inflected bangers like "Thru the Walls" and "Blood Creepin" blur Exmilitary's stylistic lines, and that's good-- it means not having to worry about scene purity or crossover potential, and focusing instead on just how much ferocity you can take.